United 93: “Too Soon?” ...Absolutely Not

“Too soon!” some New York filmgoers recently yelled after seeing the trailer for United 93, the new movie about the Boeing 757 that crashed September 11, 2001, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When this heart-pounding, gut-twisting picture opens April 28, four years, seven months, and 17 days will have elapsed since 9/11. Is that too soon?

Islamofascists do not know the words “too soon.”

And he's quite correct. If we remain deemed too sensitive to see images of the events and carnage of that day in news coverage - let alone a theatrical movie - then we will remain doomed to being too weak to recognize the enemy determined to destroy us and predetermined to submit to him.

New Yorkers are the last who should be crying, "Too soon!" and the first to declare their resolve and identify the enemy.

Living in New York City's New Jersey suburbs and witnessing that sickening plume of the WTC's dust and smoke rise above our trees, accompanied by the hauntingly disturbing silence in our normally busy skies, I have a 'close-but-not-touching' personal connection to the destruction wrought that day.

I have friends who were among the many caked with the pulverized dust of the remains of the structures and their occupants. A close friend's father survived by a chance re-scheduled meeting away from his company's offices above the impact zone. His co-workers and closest friends of many years were not so fortunate. He struggles to this day with the burden of guilt that so unjustly yokes survivors.

I do not pretend to speak for them.

I do, however, being relatively and comfortably detached from the first hand horror, guilt and pain, recognize that they were coming to kill me. They came to kill my friends and family. They nearly succeeded.

They came to kill you. They came to kill your friends and family. Perhaps they succeeded.

Are you among the numbers who cry out, "Too soon!"?

If so, you must find it within yourself to muster the strength to watch. To listen. To feel. To embrace the pain.

The same sounds and images you would bury in pained sensitivity are embraced, cheered and praised by those who would be next to visit your friends and family with death and carnage in tow. They are not swayed by reasoned sensitivity nor reactive to the compassionate responses of the well intended but misguided.

The enemy understands but one language: the language of violence he spoke with the day we lost so many. We are speaking to him in his language in battlefields known and unknown, traditional and new. We have lost fewer lives in nearly five years of effectively speaking this language than were stolen from us on that clear September day. Is it all for naught?

If you, the savagely attacked, cannot harness the resolve to recognize and face down an enemy who has already slaughtered within your own eyesight, then we are destined to a defeat at the hands of madmen who murder with religious conviction.

If we, the savagely attacked, cannot harness that resolve now, we are sentencing ourselves repeated slaughters reminiscent of that fateful day. Again. And again. And Again.